Excerpt from ontario-travel-secrets.com:
A curious little neighbourhood on the shores of Lake Ontario boasts an intriguing past.
Here you'll find a series of narrow lanes like Temple Lane and Auditorium Circle with a collection of the cutest little Victorian gingerbread cottages north of Cape Cod.
The cottages at Grimsby Beach come in a rainbow of colours, including pink, green, yellow, blue and purple – sometimes all of them on the same house. The buildings date back to the late 1800s when they were first used as summer cottages.
The history of Grimsby Beach goes way back to the mid-1800s when a group of Methodists started holding week-long religious revivals here in the summer. The area was known then as the Ontario Methodist Camp Meeting Ground and people would come and stay in tents on the grounds overnight and listen to preachers during the day.
As the event became more popular, and the revival grew to fill more weeks of the summer, the camp’s organizers saw the need for more comfortable housing. In 1875 they began replacing the tents with cute little board-and-batten cottages.
People started calling it “the Chautauqua of Canada” after the American adult education movement of the late 1800s.
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